I read Vernor Vinge’s two Zones of Thought novels so long ago that no record of them exists on this blog. They’re fantastically good space opera stories and the fresh ideas in them inspired many other works including the Mass Effect games. The Children of the Sky was a sequel that was published much later and was more of a miss than a hit. It made so little impact that I wasn’t even aware it existed for a long time. I added it to my reading list around the time that Vinge passed away because I wanted to know how the series actually ends. Unfortunately it really is as underwhelming as most make it out to be and doesn’t even feel complete as an ending.
Park Chan Wook’s latest is once again filled with murder. Unlike the past crime thrillers that established his reputation however, No Other Choice is a comedy and I think not a good one at all. The comedic timing is off, the film itself is too long and most of all, the main character is so blatantly evil it’s impossible to sympathize with him. It seems I’m the outlier here as most critics loved it as a critique of capitalism. However since I’m in favor of fair competition, I think actually murdering your competitors is not that at all and so I found this to be highly offensive to my sensibilities.
We finally get back to watching more of Louis Malle’s French work and now I’m kicking myself for not doing this much earlier. Au revoir les enfants as it’s known even in English because Goodbye, Children sounds terrible, is semi-autobiographical, based on events from the director’s childhood. We’ve seen plenty of films about the Holocaust but this one stands out for depicting civilian life in France under German occupation. It’s packed full of perceptive details on their attitudes towards the Jews, French collaborators, the progress of the war and much more and all the more devastating in its impact in that it’s from the perspective of children.
These days most of the game I play have such modest system requirements that they don’t really justify the price I paid for my PC. Cyberpunk 2077 would be the major exception as it most definitely wouldn’t have run well on my old system. The game was notoriously bugged on release so it was just as well that I took my time to get around to it. This is now a far more complete and polished game and though there are still some glitches, it’s absolutely the open-world Cyberpunk game I’ve been hankering for. It even holds special meaning for me since I’ve owned a copy of the original Cyberpunk 2020 pencil-and-paper RPG since my high school days and this game references so much material from it.
Chalk this up as another one of those films that I should have watched long ago but the stars never quite aligned to make it happen. Its reputation as the best cinematic depiction of the Age of Sail bar none has only improved over time so there’s no excuse. Indeed mere minutes into the film we get a tense and astonishingly realistic ranged battle and it only gets better from there. Its only fault might be that it starts with Jack Aubrey already in his captaincy and his relationship with his crew well-established. That does mean more time watching a skilled captain at the height of his powers playing a deadly game of cat-and-mouse at sea so it’s not a bad thing at all.
I watch so many films these days that it’s hard to feel excited any title in particular. One reliable way to still feel a frisson of thrill is watching something from a country or culture I have zero familiarity with. Haiti is one place I’d never expected to even have a cinema industry given its lawlessness, yet it has produced an impressive film in Freda. The plot of a young woman trying to survive in a country with no hope is composed of the usual tropes. But it more than makes up for it by conveying an authentic sense of what everyday life in Haiti must be like.
